"... Growing up in New York, with s at the Plaza from a very early age, my appreciation of the past and even my feeling for New York is undoubtedly conditioned by associations with that solid structure. I did not learn until years after those teas that the architect was and the date of its construction 1907, and that it was a high point of , inside and out. ... Although it is an official New York City landmark, the has jurisdiction only over what happens to its exterior. What is going on inside, where the interiors were of a piece, or to be more elegant, de l'epoque, is a kind of creeping, crawling bad taste in which even the authentic is being made to look fake. Through atrociously ill‐advised remodeling, touted as the hotel's entry into the 1970's, the Plaza is being adulterated to look and feel like any number of other older big city hotels of residual grandeur, cheapened with tricksy restaurants full of familiar and rather loathesome design gimmicks and arch menus and publicity to match."